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In 1802, a 42-year-old Frenchwoman named Marie Gresholtz arrived in London, with her four-year-old son and three wax statues. The son was the product of a short-lived marriage to one François Tussaud; the three Sleeping Beauties were part of her inheritance, left by her guardian Philippe Curtius, stormer of the Bastille and sculptor extraordinaire.

The woman, who would become known as Madame Tussaud, had lived in the company of wax since she was six. Apprenticed to Curtius, she was summoned to Versailles to teach Louis XVI’s sister how to make wax flowers and medallions. Soon she found herself producing effigies of the royal family’s decapitated heads.

Suspected of royalist sympathies, she was prepared for the guillotine herself, but managed to flee to England, where she toured the waxworks that had made Curtius famous in France. All three of the aristocratic women on whom the famous Sleeping Beauties were modelled had by then lost their lives. Making a new life for herself at the helm of a travelling show, Madame Tussaud now found herself directing a strange theatre of female objectification and male fantasy.

The Sleeping Beauty based on Louis XV’s mistress Madame du Barry was one of Curtius’s earliest works. She can still be seen in Madame Tussaud’s today, although the clockwork mechanism by which she breathed is now electric. Reclining as if ravished, her long neck exposed and her fleshy chest gently heaving underneath her beautiful dress, she is – ostentatiously – the product of a male imagination. This is a veiled fetish: a famous mistress, breathing yet unconscious of the voyeurism for which she was built, prey to the fantasies of all.

Yet Tussaud’s somnolent statues were by no means the strangest wax exhibits of their time. For most of the 19th century, at least one “anatomical Venus” was on display at any given moment. Presented as marvels, puzzles and objects for popular education, these models came apart to reveal the layers beneath the skin. A word sometimes used to describe them was “Florentine”, not just because the most intricate example had been made in Florence, but also because there was something exotic and erotic about them. This totally naked woman could be undressed still further: right down to her arteries and intestines.

Sometimes the erotic aspect was less subtly rendered. In 1885, for instance, a touring exhibition in Blackpool boasted “a full-length Florentine model” of the Belgian mystic Louise Lateau, advertised as “prone to ecstatic trances”. Lateau was indeed famous for her trances, but she wasn’t an obvious candidate for anatomical research. Only someone looking for an excuse to depict a woman’s face in ecstasy would have modelled her in wax.

This troubled territory is investigated by Joanna Ebenstein in her wonderful and epically illustrated book, The Anatomical Venus. She traces the Florentine’s varied ancestry back into sex toys and memento mori, via anatomists, artists, showmen and moral crusaders. The Surrealist doll-contorter Hans Bellmer puts in an appearance, as does the Marquis de Sade, on the run from charges of sodomy in France, pausing to admire Gaetano Zumbo’s wax “theatres of death”.

Venus Endormie, 1874Credit:
Marc Dantan courtesy of Thames & Hudson

As Ebenstein points out, the most accomplished anatomical Venus ever made was the Medici Venus, constructed by Clemente Susini in 1780-82 under the direction of the physician Felice Fontana, and still on display at the museum they founded, La Specola in Florence. Fontana’s project was “an encyclopedia of the human body”, an enlightened aim that hoped to have as a side effect the end of dissection. In the Renaissance, artists were more likely than anatomists to conduct dissections (Leonardo is said to have dissected more than 100 bodies; Michelangelo reputedly asked to be paid for his work in corpses). Since then, the practice had become widespread.

Fontana’s plan was to preserve replicas of the human machine in an “odour-free and incorruptible state”. The museum was not to be the preserve of medical students or draftsmen but open to all members of the public, including women and children. The pinnacle of the visit was the Medici Venus, a dissectible figure in seven parts, encased in Venetian glass and reclining on a silk cushion.

Although we may now be struck by the gruesomeness of these displays, death was not a problem to the people originally viewing them. Death was an entirely faceable fact, from the martyrdoms in Catholic churches to the post-mortem photographs favoured by the Victorians: the Paris morgue itself was a tourist attraction.

An 1803-5 wax model of the eye by Clemente Susini in Florence's La Specola museum

What remains strange is the decorative seductiveness of the anatomical Venus. Why should a corpse be rendered as if in ecstasy? Why would one bother to decorate it with ribbons and pearl necklaces? If the organs are made of wax, why should the hair and eyelashes be real? Why engineer it so that the fake woman can cry or bleed? Without the fetish element, none of it quite adds up.

Italo Calvino, writing about the curious 19th-century waxworks of Pierre Spitzner, noted four disembodied hands attached to the waxwork of a pregnant woman. The hands, male, were cut off at the wrists, showing neatly buttoned shirt cuffs and the edges of jacket sleeves, “as though the whole ceremony were being held by people in evening dress”.

It’s no accident that these female figures came to be called “Venus”. They borrowed the proportions of famous painted Venuses, but that was not all; these were erotic objects. The Medici Venus, Ebenstein tells us, is sometimes referred to as “the demountable Venus”. The phrase is a mistranslation of the Italian word meaning “disassembly”, but the fuzzy rendering is instructive: who has “mounting” on their mind when they look at her?

In Britain, most public anatomical shows were shut down after the Obscene Publications Act of 1857, but Tussaud’s languishing women remained. They were just feminine, after all, not obscene; and they went on being represented that way, like so many floating Ophelias.

As Edgar Allan Poe put it: “The death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world.”

The Anatomical Venus by Joanna Ebenstein is published by Thames & Hudson at £19.95. To order a copy from the Telegraph for £16.95 plus £1.99 p&p, call 0844 871 1515